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Who is this guy?

Jason Freyer is a youth pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, PA. He enjoys his job so much that he has decided to spend countless hours of his free time writing about it in the new modern medium of weblog, or blog. That brings us here. Welcome to the blog of J, or in its condensed version, J-Blog. Jason writes this blog to be by youth pastors, for youth pastors, but watch with amazement as he dives into other topics as worship leading, preaching, politics, the Pittsburgh sports scene, or whatever else happens to be on his mind. Jason lives with his wife Sarah and their two dogs Marley and Melvin. This is some of the finest third person writing he's done in a while.

Good morning friends!
For various reasons, I am a little bit cranky today. The good news is it has little to do with my return to work, and a lot to do with how someone out there tried to screw me over. I will be spending the day trying to figure out who.
So I figure while I'm already cranky, I'll pick a fight that I've been thinking about fighting for a while now.

This issue of gay marriage is a serious one, which almost suggests that this blog is not the place to discuss it. I have long been conflicted about the issue. My heart goes out to people, and my default position is to love. In a sinful and broken world, is it right that we pick out one sin and make some people feel horrible about it? Isn't it our job to build up and support people? Isn't it our job to encourage and bless others? But then on the other side of the coin, the Bible seems to be pretty clear on the issue, and I want to do my very best to live according to the Word. My heart is torn on this, and all of this is by way of saying that if you think I take this lightly, you're out of your mind.

(Crazy)

However, (and the reason this is all in my mind at the moment) I found unusual wisdom in an unusual place. Zach Lind from the band Jimmy Eat World has a blog that I found today, and in it he wrote some interesting stuff about the concept of gay marraige and the attempt to make a constitutional amendment to ban it:

So with that said, and before I try to answer Dan’s questions, I want to point out that I think the question leaves some pretty big stones unturned. First, our society as a whole (Christians included) has already accepted that marriage today is not the same as marriage was when the bible was written. For example, we’ve already discarded polygamy as a valid form of marriage, which was not prohibited, across the board, for all members of the church in the NT. Another example would be that divorce has become commonplace and increasingly accepted, even within the Christian community. So if one is to say that marriage is exclusively between one man and one woman, forever, they have come to that conclusion while relying largely on their own rationale derived from experience and cultural understanding, not from a strict adherence to what the scriptures say on these various matters. If this isn’t the case, then why aren’t proponents of this view doing all they can to legislate an end to the entire concept of divorce, along with banning same-sex marriage. If one shares the view of “one man, one woman” but doesn’t fight to eliminate any kind of marital practice that deviates from that formula, then “definitions” obviously don’t matter a whole lot…..at least when it comes to heterosexual, post-biblical marriage practices. And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s as simple as gay sexual relations being perceived as inherently “naughtier” than heterosexuals who commits adultery by entering into multiple marriages (or the more snappier name, “polygamy in intervals”). If definitions were that important, that battle would have been fought a long time ago.

(deep)

On this issue, I don't claim to have all the answers. I think the people that do are either ignorant or arrogant, or perhaps both. Thoughts like this fill my mind with more questions than answers, and will likely keep me awake at night. What if we were to make divorce illegal? What would that do to our thoughts about marriage? Would people take it more seriously? Where do we get the idea of "one man, and one woman" when almost every place where the Bible speaks out against homosexual relationships it advocates polygamy? Are we perhaps trying to stuff our own cultural views into the Bible and call them truth?